The alarm has been sounded; cue Paul Revere. On December 28th, Chris Floyd of
Empire Burlesque posted what should be the first must-read essay of 2006:
Clowntime is Over: Last Stand of the American Republic
With a bitter precision to make even such expert skewerers as James Wolcott jealous, Lloyd lays out our predicament in the starkest terms. With the scandalous news of the NSA illegally spying on Americans, he writes,
"... The Bush Regime is saying to the various powers-that-be, especially in Congress and the courts, but also to centers of power and influence outside government: you no longer have any power. All real power is now in our gift. Your laws, your institutions, your traditions, the whole complex infrastructure of checks and balances that have sustained society are now essentially meaningless. As in ancient Rome, we will keep the old forms, but the life of the state has now passed into the hands of the autocrat and his court. His arbitrary will can override any law -- although of course, strong law will still be applied to his enemies, and to the riff-raff in the lower orders.
Lloyd calls on the American establishment to answer the bell:
"Let's be clear about this: only the Establishment -- the institutional powers-that-be -- can break an outlaw president. Millions marched in the street against Nixon and the system; whole city quadrants went up in flames in those days; but none of this was decisive in the corridors of power. ... It was his insult to the institutions -- the Watergate break-in of Democratic headquarters, the subsequent cover-up and subversion of the legal system, the defiance of Congress -- that led to his downfall. He pushed too far, tried to grab too much -- and the Establishment pulled him short.
And it will have to be the Establishment that breaks Bush -- or he won't be broken. All the blogs in the world won't bring him down, no matter how much truth they tell, how much bloodsoaked Bushist dirt they expose.
Them's fighting words around here, but there is an element of truth to them, since President Bush has made it amply clear that grassroots outcry can be dismissed with the flip of a hand and a one-liner about "focus groups." (Either that, or the netroots needs to find a way to put some material punch behind our pixels.)
Lloyd is understandably dubious of whether said "establishment" is up to the task, and inventories his pessimism in brutal terms:
The past few years give little grounds for hope: the Democrats spineless, conflicted, co-opted and corrupt; the Republicans slavish, bellicose, cruel and criminal; the media timorous, witless, corporate-controlled; big business absolutely rolling in gravy from the autocrat's larder; academia cowed, silenced, ignored, demonized; the military acquiescent in criminal aggression, top-heavy with time-servers currying autocratic favor. Only the courts provide some stray sparks of hope, although they too are now loaded with political sycophants, corporate bagmen and knuckle-dragging throwbacks produced by the Right's decades-long devolution of American jurisprudence. Prosecutors like Patrick Fitzgerald and Elliot Spitzer "keep hope alive," but their efforts will mean little in a system where lawlessness at the top has been countenanced by the rest of the Establishment. And in any case, the outcome of their work lies ultimately with the Supreme Court -- the same court that shredded the Constitution in awarding power to Bush in the first place, and which is now led by a Bushist apparatchik.
He concludes:
The next few weeks will show us if there is still some hope of restoring the Republic through the old institutions, or if we will have to follow the course laid out by Bob Dylan some 40 years ago: "Strike another match, go start anew."
No tipjar -- but please recommend, so others see this and read Lloyd's warning. If it has already been diaried, my apologies; the Kos search function doesn't work well on my sluggish laptop.